Giving freely

In the late 19th century the number of millionaires in America began to grow rapidly, from a mere hundred in the 1870s to more than 40,000 by World War I. The owners of new wealth, fueled by the success of their new corporations, helped bring about a little-understood change in American democracy, according to historian Olivier Zunz, who has long studied forces that shape U.S. society.

In a visionary shift that would affect future generations, the most influential of the new rich, such as John D. Rockefeller and Mrs. Olivia Sage, began to think of their private money as a public asset — an asset they themselves, or their managers and experts, would direct for the benefit of all.

“There was something thrilling for a single donor to entertain the idea that he or she was personally rich enough to buy social betterment,” said Zunz, Commonwealth Professor of History, who is in the midst of a large-scale study of American philanthropy that will attempt to show its key role in the political economy.

As America’s wealth and standard of living grew, donors began to work together with reformers, seeing themselves as “a new force in civilization.” As Zunz put it: “Charity had been for the needy. Philanthropy was to be for humankind.”

Americans in all walks of life contribute to nonprofit causes.  From the wealthiest foundations to door-to-door campaigns, the annual donations to the nonprofit sector have been about equal to the Pentagon’s budget, at least in peacetime.

Zunz, who has taught at U.Va. since 1978, has examined other powerful social forces in such influential books as “Making America Corporate” and “Why the American Century?” French-born and -educated, he is also a leading authority on Alexis de Tocqueville and editor of the definitive new Library of America volume of the political philosopher’s classic “Democracy in America.”

In studying corporate wealth Zunz became intrigued with how powerful philanthropy was but saw that its history “is currently understood only in fragmentary ways.” He not only wants to bring that history up to date by looking at the wealth generated by the technology revolution but “to deepen our conceptualization of the encounter between giving and democratic practice.”

As practiced in the United States, he said, philanthropy “has become a critical means for enlarging democracy and for engaging a broad portion of the citizenry in ideas and decision making.”

With grants from the Ford, W.W. Kellogg and Charles Stewart Mott foundations, Zunz has gathered hundreds of little-known studies in law, politics, history and business, as well as biographies of philanthropists and masses of annual reports. He plans more research in corporate and foundation archives for a book that would be a wide-ranging history of philanthropy’s role in modern America.

Some may be liberal, some conservative in outlook, and most have pet causes, but all philanthropic and nonprofit institutions “are critical to American well-being and shaping public policy,” Zunz believes.

For the Romans, philanthropy meant spending a fortune on large public entertainments for political purposes. In the British empire, giving was largely thought of as charity. Modern American philanthropy, said Zunz, is “an original development that has become a powerful engine of civil governance.”